Tara here: ​I began writing Disclaimer a few years ago, and this past Saturday we did our first public production of the piece, at The Public. The week leading up to that was, in my memory, the closest Iran and the US ever came to all out war. This lifelong fear that I talk about in this show was appearing to become a reality. I hope, despite the ongoing grief for the lives lost so far, and the search for justice that is happening in Iran now, that we have avoided the worst, and that there is an end to any violence. One of the great gifts of developing Disclaimer has been the opportunity to work with other Iranian and Iranian-American artists, and to invite them into our Piehole collaboration. One of these artists, Layla Khoshnoudi, a talented (and hilarious!) actor, writer, and all around artist, has written a reflection on Iran-US relations in light of the recent events. I'm so grateful to Layla for her insightful feedback as a collaborating artist on Disclaimer, and for allowing me to share this with you all:

Hello, my name is Layla Khoshnoudi. You can call me Layla Khoshnoudi, or Layla Khosh, or Layla K or Layla.I ask people to realize, that Iran and USA are so, so, the same. The USA’s world-domination fantasies have developed more floridly over the past century, but it all comes out in the wash I believe. I ask people to level up in consciousness, and dare to believe in the possibility of peace. Iran and America are two great countries, which can and must work together to empower peace in the world. What I love about the show Disclaimer is the humble expression of what, to me, is the most profound truth underlying all of this egoic conflict. We are all the same, and we all die. Me, I am not an academic. I am not an authority on this matter, except that I was gifted with some intrinsic scope, being born American, from Iranians. I am unmistakably, grateful for my existence here. I love my life, and I am grateful. I do at times resent, however, the negligence of what I’ll refer to as Passive America, to appreciate the culture from ‘my land’ and from ‘others’ land’; the failure to understand its own legacy in oppression (on an individual and societal level); and the failure to reflect on their own humanity enough to fathom the nuance of this conflict. There is a profound reflection to be found between Iran and The USA.Each person must start with him or herself, in the pursuit of peace. And also, please know that Iran is a unique country in the middle east. It is not Arabic. There are multiple ethnicities in the Middle East, and Iranian (or Persian) is one of them. We are very quirky and kind of insane (consider the fact that we have two names). And though prone to extreme stances, Iran is a powerful, courageous, and rich culture, with its own prerogative for evolution, and bigger fish to fry than defending itself from western Imperialism which has a long tradition of taking resources without properly paying for them— A dynamic which has provoked a lot of chaos and bitterness. Okay. Anyway, I care about few things as much as my family’s country of origin. So thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. Change can happen, like that.

Around this time of year, aka Year-End Fundraising Time, we reflect on why Piehole makes the work we make, what it does for us, and what we bring to our community of audiences, supporters and artists who participate along the way. A lot of the time when I consider the work we’ve done, no matter the approach or the scope of the work, there is often one epic, underlying existential question that we’re asking in making it. With our latest project, Disclaimer, the inspiration for the project began with a very small, personal, and specific question: Why did I do that?

Back in Spring 2010, I hosted a Persian New Year Murder Mystery Party, in which I made a bunch of Persian food (with some reinforcements from my mom), and invited a bunch of non-Iranian friends to my apartment for a dinner party. I assigned them each a role to play, and gave them each secrets. The characters I assigned were all initially inspired by people from my life, but then exaggerated and distorted to make space for the intrigue required for a proper Murder Mystery plot. There were secret dealings, conspiracies, and love triangles, that transformed my loved ones into archetypes from British Murder Mysteries, which, when layered with their Iranian origins, became media stereotypes of Middle Eastern people.

My friends were uncomfortable initially when I asked them to do things like speak with an accent, or wear a headscarf. But I insisted it was okay because I was telling them to do it. Over the course of the evening, with the aid of alcohol, everyone was able to ease into the situation a bit more. At some point, my Muslim Bangladeshi landord came up to tell us we were being too loud, and was startled to find my friends wearing headscarves. What is Happening?

I have to say, it was a fun night. But ever since, I’ve been asking myself the question: Why did I do that?

I thought about making a theater piece to figure it out, and went through many different ideas in my head over the years, but it wasn't until shortly after the Muslim Ban in 2017 that I actually felt the urge to begin writing. Although this latest event did not have an exact analogue in the Bush-era, I found myself constantly reminded of my emotions and psychological state in high school and college post-9/11 and found myself writing in a completely different direction, as a way of processing my whiplash to the W years, when the targeting of Muslims reached another fever pitch. I wrote about this, and just kept writing and writing.

Is there an explanation for this?

Meanwhile, I was “liking” photo essays about queer muslims existing, and photos that show how nice and normal Muslim people can be. I thought, People have to see this and also, My god, how hateful are people that they need to see this? Why is this “empathy” buzzword so hard to achieve that we have to spoon feed people so carefully with positive and contrasting representations of Muslims so they don’t get the wrong idea? Why is Bill Maher still on TV?

Over the past couple of years, I started to work with Jeff on figuring out how the writing I was doing, which imagines a person hosting an event intended to stop a war between the US and Iran, connects back to this Iranian Murder Mystery play I’d been toying around with for years. In 2018 I shared my writing with Piehole, and later with the New Georges Jam, and in 2019 I did a reading of a full draft at the inaugural Emruz Festival, a festival of Iranian artists in Brooklyn. I shared my work with friends, and felt sure the next step would be asking people (like you!) if I could perform the piece in their living rooms, with zero aspirations of doing it in a theater.

This is why it was so strange when over the summer, Piehole was approached by Under the Radar at The Public Theater, asking us what we were up to, and seeing if we’d be interested in doing Disclaimer in the Incoming! series in January. We talked it over as a collective, and decided, after some initial sheepishness, to make this a Piehole piece! But what would this mean? When one of our members had written a play, what exactly does it mean to make it a Piehole piece? The aspects of the play I felt unsure about had to do with the interactivity of the piece, and the unfolding dramaturgy of what is described versus what actually happens in the room. These are the aspects that I wanted the Piehole creative core to come together and figure out, as we continue adapting this piece for an ‘actual theater,’ as opposed to your living room.

This piece has enabled me to bring together many of my favorite things. I do love British Murder Mysteries. I also love making people do Iranian things. How these elements relate to the impetus behind the play, and what it all means, I’d like for you to experience through the show. But what I will say is that working together with Iranian and Iranian-American artists alongside my non-Iranian Piehole-mates is very meaningful to me, and makes the process itself a site for bringing together the different parts of my identity as an Iranian-American.

The truth must be unmasked at all costs.

​So, while this all began originally in an attempt to answer “Why did I host a murder mystery dinner party in which I made my non-Iranian friends play Iranian stereotypes?”, it became a way of dealing with the complex feelings surrounding the desire to (re)present “my people” well, and my resentment of others seeming to need me to do so. And as I keep creating, it’s taking me somewhere else altogether -- to a place where my collaborators and I are bridging these cultures and these countries without ever having actually intended to.

US-Iran relations appear to be as fraught as I’ve ever seen them, and I don’t know that this play will change that. But it’s certainly given me a way to process the layered feelings and experiences that directly and indirectly relate to this tense relationship. In true Piehole form, Disclaimer takes unexpected pathways into these issues, and I am so excited to invite an audience in figure it all out with us in January!

From January 24-29, Piehole's went to Sundance with our pals Tender Claws, for an early press-preview of The Under Presents. Produced by Oculus, this project combines live theater and VR, and brings this experience to your living room via The Quest, Oculus' newest headset. We have been having so much fun figuring out how live performance works in VR, and working with some of our favorite NYC performing artists in "The Under" - the cabaret space that frames the story within a story in this sprawling world. Players can enjoy a more plot driven experience on a stranded ship, or explore The Under, where they may find pop startists, dancing cats, office jazzercise routines, and a skeleton-drummer named Tina. We can't wait to tell you more! Meanwhile, enjoy this trailer...

So, Virtual Reality--What is it? is it cool, or is it wack? The immersive next step for storytelling, or a goofy hat for your face? IF ANYONE TRIES TO TELL YOU THE ANSWER, THEY ARE LYING BECAUSE ACTUALLY NO ONE KNOWS YET.

2018 has been full of exciting new projects and challenges for Piehole as we’ve been called upon to bring our experience creating delightful, surprising and at times inadvisably strange theater to new contexts.

You may have heard about Tendar, the AR project we told you about back when it premiered at Sundance in January, or if you’ve seen any of us, you may have heard us talk about the VR project we’ve been working on, about a ship that gets stuck in a time loop.

These are both collaborations with Tender Claws, a small, LA-based company of artists led by our friends Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro (a Piehole member of olde!). Tender Claws uses hi-tech storytelling mediums that are mostly new to us (e-readers, video games, leaf blowers), but bring to them a doubtful, playful eye, a commitment to the compellingly weird, and a tendency to lovingly invent new hybrid forms for each project, that us Pieholes can really get down with.

For Tendar, the AR* project about a virtual pet fish that eats your emotions, Piehole became a little writer’s room. This meant writing for an interactive medium, focusing on fostering a sense of liveness, and giving the audience/user a sense of agency (in a totally artificial context), that their actions affect things, while still allowing them to be surprised by the experience. The game grapples with the way we use and are used by our technology, yet at its core…it’s about a cheeky fish that needs to eat your facial expressions and buy choice toys for its tank. And, we never thought we’d say this, but….It’s now available at the Google Play Store (if you have an android).

And here’s the trailer:

*FAQs and Ineloquent Answers: What’s AR? It stands for augmented reality. What’s the difference between that and VR? For AR, think Pokemon Go. You hold your phone up to reality, and your camera shows you what’s there in real life, but other virtual stuff is layered on top. In VR, you wear a headset and are transported to a completely virtual space.

The Virtual Reality project (yes that’s right, the kind where you put on the headset and hand controllers), has a much greater scope/scale, both in terms of the piece itself, and Piehole’s involvement in it. We can’t say a lot of specific things about this project yet, so here is a decontextualized list of some things that we, a scrappy theater company, have been doing on this VR piece:

Writing for VR, figuring out what's similar to and different from writing for theater

Curating artists we love into the piece! And understanding how to best translate their work to the medium of VR

Casting for voice over and motion capture for the whole game (and directing the vocal and physical sides of acting separately)

Considering levels of abstraction and realism when it comes to the physical acting and vocal acting styles, that somehow bridge with the animation style

In September and October, we were in our most intense phase of this project. In the Motion Capture work, the acting focus was often on physical specificity and efficiency in movement. At the same time, having recorded the voiceover first, actors also faced the challenge of syncing up physicality with speaking, keeping in mind that the animated avatars don’t have mouths. These types of puzzles brought up one of the most fundamental aspects of theater making - a consideration of the voice and body, which really hearkened back to Piehole’s early days, which focused so heavily on puppetry and mask work. It’s funny how working on this new technology instantly put us back in touch with working in some of the oldest theater traditions that exist! It’s that old and new tech combo we’ve always loved in Piehole! We’re dorks! Yes!

We would be remiss to not mention that all of these considerations and aspects of the game are all subject to the power of the Tech Gods. Working on this project required a great deal of flexibility and faith. The old “Hang on Tightly, Let Go Lightly” adage became a daily mantra. We’d plan to do this ambitious list of tasks one week, but like so many mythological gods, the technology gods (channeled by some truly divinely-inspired Tender Claws shamans) are fickle and don’t heed human plans, so we shift tracks, do something else.

“The 3 premises for what is possible tech-wise are X, Y, and Z. Now let’s make 100 decisions based on those premises.” The next time we convene, X has been outdated, Y is glitchy, and Z is...just not right for this project anymore. These changes also mean that what we need to do and when, is always in flux. It’s all VERY exciting and VERY scary!

But what luck! That we have an ensemble-based practice! We flex that ensemble muscle to pick up slack (while using Slack!), we communicate and check in to see what’s working and what isn’t, we figure out what we can’t do and ask someone else to do it, we take on new roles at random points in the process…and just as we do in the day to day “experimental theater company” lifestyle, we fight to make Creativity possible, to avoid letting Logistics win out and crush the spirit.

As we continue to work on the VR piece into 2019, we’re looking forward to seeing how this work will feedback into our theater. It’s already clear how the interactive writing has developed our approach to the newest project with playwright Celine Song, Tread on Me, Tread Softly (working title). This piece is an audio-guided experience. Audience members wear headphones and listen to a voice who tells them stories and occasionally incites them to partake in actions and collective decision-making. Our work on this piece is certainly informed by our experience on the AR and VR projects, while focusing more fully on the interplay between audience members in a shared space.

We’re so grateful to have the opportunity to explore the edges of what theater is, and what it means for something to be Live. It’s allowed us to stretch ourselves far away from what we have made in the past, while interrogating the very foundation of what we do.

We recently traveled with Tender Claws to the New Frontier program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, to debut/field-test a short, two-person version of TendAR.

Following this invaluable experience workshopping our writing with the real live public, we went back to NYC and are now putting the finishing touches on our contributions to the full-length app—coming soon to a phone near you!

Now, we know you're wondering—needless to say, a LOT of celebrities played TendAR at Sundance (ask us in person for the full red carpet rundown), but for a taste here's Piehole Jeff conducting some emotional calibration for methinks-protesting-too-much celebrity "non-couple" Suki Waterhouse and Darren Aronofsky in preparation for their TendAR experience.

​Until we can officially announce TendAR's release date, please do imagine things to come in the form of this gallery of brave TendAR samplers at Sundance, and, coincidentally, people in some of the stranger poses we've seen with a cell phone...

How can the premiere of Ski End be just a week and a half away? After almost two years of work, how can we be so close to letting this thing loose upon the world? Does my inclination to indulge in nostalgia for the recent past before the show is even over make me...like...a...fascist? Should I avoid indulging in that nostalgia just in case? Is nostalgia even the right word? Am I just taking stock in a normal, healthy way? Hey…have we told you all how things are going lately? Well, things have changed a lot since last summer when we performed Ski End 1.0 at the Ice Factory. We've rehearsed at IRT, we've rehearsed at New York Theatre Workshop, we've rehearsed in our apartments, we've even rehearsed at Emilie and Alexandra's office. Now we're all set up in the former synagogue at Westbeth Artists Housing, where a group of three actual-real-life skater teens walked in on us flailing around the other day and struck terror (or joy? Can't tell the difference) into our hearts. Soon, though, we'll have to pack up and move into our final home for the show - the New Ohio Theatre. Our first preview is April 30th! Got it? And our last show is May 19th. That's a Friday. Don't forget!

​So where do we stand right now? Well, Alexandra might be found late at night on a hot Sunday creating new elements for the set; Tara and Deepali might be cloistered away discussing new music; Jeff and Ben might be fabricating back-up skis because boy are we being rough with those things. Every night we come home to 50-100 alerts from Google Docs – the script is morphing and maturing like a living creature feeding on our energy at rehearsals. Questions asked on any given night might range from “how can I be a better person?” to “is this branch going to fall on my head?” And, so often, we hear the ominous answer “we’re going to have to take this to the ‘turgs” (dramaturgs, that is, Elliot and Lauren).

At times the temptation is to just keep rehearsing—forever. To replicate the deliberate “stuckness” the characters in the show choose. We’re safe in our lovely rehearsal space at Westbeth, bustling away and inventing games—why leave? But of course we have all of these questions; questions about how to manage the apocalyptic thoughts that bloom in our minds, and we can’t force the ‘turgs to answer everything. We have to ask an audience!

It's been illuminating for us, as theater-makers and humans, to be creating this piece in spite of (or in tandem with?) the current onslaught of bad news. How strange it's been for the development of this project to span such seemingly different eras. We felt our perspective on "apocalyptic thinking" shift from one of slightly disapproving removal to genuine empathy. Yes—it's ok to feel like chaos is tapping at the door. But then we have to decide...do we lock the door and hide in the bathroom? Or do we lock the door and climb out the bathroom window? Or is that a bad analogy? And when we escape chaos, do we finally understand its opposite —cosmos? Or would that understanding bring us too close to the blinding terror of the Sublime, plunging us back into chaos again? It's hard to be sure. That's why we need you, even more than we did this summer when things were different (or were they, really? Well the show was pretty different, that much is for sure!)

​But most importantly, our teenage collaborators gave up time during their Spring Break to rehearse with us. We gotta honor that. Tickets dates and deets here! See you soon!

Thanks to some amazing support from our community of donors, we exceeded our telethon goal of raising $5,000, which put us well on our way to our year-end fundraising goal of $15,000. If you missed the telethon, you can still make a tax deductible donation be clicking here.

That $15,000 goal will fund Piehole for a whole year, including our Spring 2017 production of SKI END.

2016 was a marathon year of hard work and late nights for us, so it’s only fitting that our final act was a 24-hour live telethon during which we didn’t “nap” anywhere near as much as we optimistically told ourselves we would. Despite the fact that some of our natural rhythms have been thrown out of balance for the foreseeable future as a result, it was a deeply satisfying and affirming experience - and, as it turns out, an endurance performance that makes us feel truly proud! Particularly because trying to plan such an undertaking while simultaneously getting back into rehearsals for Ski End AND trying to understand how to be active participants in our faltering society was...not easy. Credit for carrying us over the finish line (or, let’s be honest, carrying us to the starting line in the first place) must go first and foremost to our dear friend Allen Riley, whose complex and sculptural live TV set-up has been inspiring us for a few years now. When Alexandra interviewed him during the second and third installations of the ‘thon, the whole event gained a sense of meaning and context that went way beyond raising money. Which is not to malign raising money, of course, because that’s what we were doing! And it worked! As I myself have learned during many a public radio pledge drive, people will pay if they see you workin' for it. Is your voice cracking from repeating the same number over and over again? Yeah, I’ll donate to that, absolutely! But of course there was more to it than that. There were times when we felt we were engaged in a public experiment, a brief way of life, in which many of you were actively participating...commenting, staying up later than you meant to, egging us on, watching us get looser and weirder. Even though it was only 24 hours, I’ll probably eventually remember it as a distinct period in my life where we all lived together in a super-secret-location somewhere in Brooklyn. And what happened during that wild era in the waning years of our youth? Almost too much to name! But here are some highlights (possibly out of order):

​

We got off to a thoughtful and invigorating start with old chums Sarah Campen, Bob Christensen, and Hannah Pepper-Cunningham. They were calling in from Juneau and New Orleans, respectively, and offered perspective on making art and theater not only way outside of New York, but in parts of the country that exist on the front lines of climate change.

We were shocked to realize we’d been chatting with them for about an hour when our next guests, Lauren Whitehead and Alec Duffy showed up, live and in-person! We hadn’t planned to interview them at the same time, but we were glad we did because their work dovetails so beautifully and now they’re going to get a cup of coffee!!

Our teenaged collaborators Kijani and Maite joined us and we got to catch up. Our temporary society felt a lot more like a real society when we got a little intergenerational conversation going. Maite performed a few pieces for us, and Kijani made the case for our fundraising effort. We’re so excited to spend more time with them in rehearsals! Also, Alexandra taught us how to draw a powerful horse.

International reinforcements starting appearing - Sina Heiss and her collaborator Marlene came all the way from Austria (maybe not just for the telethon, but still) and we talked about theater, politics, and the color green in Austria. Piehole collaborator Hye Young Chyun, in town from South Korea, appeared briefly and miraculously to deliver donuts.

Our friend Deepali Gupta, who wrote music for Ski End, sang original songs for us as we sat down to dinner. Maybe this would become part of the nightly ritual forever? Hopefully?? This was reality now, wasn’t it?

More friend reinforcements started appearing, and Matt Tong, stalwart Piehole ally, barely realized that he’d been manning the video station for hours. Jess Goldschmidt gave us a rousing performance of “what’s in the bag” (must be seen to be believed). Emily Friend Roberts, aka Erma Fiend, provided us with a makeup tutorial that turned Elliot into a glamourous melting mall elf for the next 16 hours. Maya Taylor provided us with a box of caffeine pills, two of which were promptly downed by Brendan Thomas Crowley, who would bravely carry us through the late night.

When Ski End ensemble member Ben Vigus starting juggling to the rhythm of Elliot’s perfect apple-chopping, we knew we were in for the long haul. It would not be the last time we saw the world through juggle-cam.

Brendan introduced us to the terrors of the night by telling a series of bone-chilling ghost stories. He also introduced us to the terrors of the present by promising to sing an improvised parody song entitled “Trump Says” to the tune of “Jane Says” for a donation of $50. Much to his chagrin, his challenge was met by devoted Telethon viewer Kevin McKenna.

The apple-chopping became part of an overnight pie-making ritual which briefly landed us in another dimension.

We settled into a quieter period - toasting our high school English teachers with a glass of traditional wassail, enjoying readings from Anne of Green Gables, Johnny Got His Gun, and Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder...all of which brought us treacherously close to the dark heart of total awareness in the moment. Some people took naps while others doubled down on a wakeful mania. ​

In the early hours, we began to hear from other parts of the world - our friend Blair told us what the dawn would be like from her vantage point in Brazil, and original Piehole-er Michelle Oing called us from Amsterdam. She was a lot more conscious than we were, and she pulled us through the darkest hour. We argued about onion rings. Just when Michelle could hold the lifeline no longer, Ski End ensemble member Emilie Soffe and her partner (and our pal) Jeff Doyle arrived on their way to the airport with a box of granola bars. ​

It was time for more intergenerational connection: Alexandra called her grandmother in Denmark. Granny gave us some advice. Later, her granddaughter would teach us all to draw a boat.

Coffee, breakfast, the crossword, nearly dropping the camera on Elliot’s dog Keira while we tried to feed her. The crossword was a true group effort, as our loyal viewers began to awaken bright and early on a Saturday morning. After having played the master of the night and telling one more horrifying ghost story, Brendan finally collapsed. Later we would see his sweet sleeping face up close and personal.

Maite, up earlier than I ever was on a Saturday morning at 17, re-joined us and helped Elliot finish the pie of the night.

Chana Porter, co-founder of the Octavia Project, arrived with her collaborator Chandanie Hiralal - a young fantasy writer who read us an excerpt from a novel she wrote as a teenager. By that point things had reached the fantastical at multiple levels.

Bahar Behbahani called in to tell us that donating to Piehole helped her find her wallet. Seemed like a solid endorsement to us!

Kathryn Wallem, original Piehole with a depth of fundraising knowledge, arrived to lead us in some stretches and teach everyone the lost art of the check. Surprisingly informative!

Matt Tong re-appeared with a reprisal of “What’s in the Bag.” The Bag contained coffee jelly and caffeinated gum!

WE MADE OUR GOAL! After an explosion of emotion, we realized we still had a couple more hours to go, so there was nothing for it but to settle into a game of Scrabble while Elliot read from Moby Dick.

We could tell the sun was shining. The donations kept rolling in. The tree was lit. Finally it was time to emerge into the daylight, renewed and buoyed by the lifetime we all lived together between those walls for those 24 hours. I don’t know about anyone else, but I personally have no memory of the following week. All I saw was the support and solidarity represented in our Winter Wonderland Donorama Diorama, where tiny anthropomorphic avatars for our donors formed our ideal town.

This month, Piehole is doing a development workshop of Ski End at IRT Theatre in the West Village as part of our Archive Residency.

The first day of our rehearsal was scheduled for the day after Election Day.

We had assumed we would be celebrating the end of a stressful and painful election, that we would have broken a glass ceiling, and that we could return to the privileged position of our usual levels of activism. Lately, our attentions had been on deeper systemic issues in our country, that are difficult to unpack and address, like systemic racism and money in politics. But when Trump won, we were suddenly overwhelmed by so much existing and potential devastation, that we initially couldn’t fathom where to place our feelings or to direct our attention. Suddenly, we had to protest his hateful language, his corrupt history, his racist cabinet appointments, his climate-change-denying stance, the list goes on. He has flooded the channels with abominations, and it's hard to know where to begin. Needless to say, we entered rehearsal Day 1 on Wednesday with a lot of new information and feelings to process. I can’t say that we were all solidly in the “art matters now more than ever” camp, though there was some feeling of that...or even that we were all sure that this was “exactly what I need to be doing right now.” But here’s a run-down of what we did in that rehearsal and how it may have helped us:

We spent the first hour talking about the election, the state of our country, what we’re all noticing and experiencing, what the word “hot take” means, what we think Huma is feeling right now, etc.

We spent some time doing a physical warm up, breathing, hearing cracks in our bones, and beginning to feel light and powerful. At one point I thought while running around flapping my arms “this is a good reminder of agency, something I can do that brings me joy and that the prez-elect & co can’t take away from me. I’ll hang on to this for whenever I need it.”

Because our work and process is very porous to our day-to-day experiences and what we notice happening in the world around us, we rolled up our sleeves and spent time delineating the ways in which recent events inform and shed light upon the themes at play in SKI END. One of SKI END’s central themes is the way apocalyptic narratives form, and how they can lead to paralysis. We had previously considered “doom narratives” as something dangerous that must be avoided, pointing to the big orange guy as somebody who fosters doom narratives in order to prey on voters through fear. His apocalyptic narrative relies on nostalgia for a previously “great" America that is only getting worse and worse. But now, those of us experiencing his victory as our frightening loss are struggling to avoid a similar kind of apocalyptic thinking, which might layer on top of us and crush hope. It’s helpful to draw the comparison between both examples of doomy thinking, because it helps us get much deeper inside the temptation of doom, rather than simply judging it for being indulgent. We are finding that working to destabilize doom narratives can allow us to acknowledge our emotions, and view them critically, while taking responsibility for the horrors of the world we live in, rather than simply lamenting them.

Armed with some specific ideas of what this may mean for our approach, we got on our feet and dove into the play.

If you’ve seen our work, you know that Piehole works to create space for multiplicity, complexity, surprise and delight. The whole enterprise is about shifting and expanding perspectives, our own and our audience's. So as we challenge ourselves to work through all of this, we aim to translate this process into a thought-provoking journey for our audience.

For me, being in rehearsals for Ski End right now feels right somehow. It is a privilege to be able to carve out space in our lives to come together as a group of people who are all dedicated to understanding and reflecting something that feels true about the world, while posing questions to an audience through our work. Spending TIME with ideas and events, crafting a synthesis of different viewpoints, feels like an essential alternative to the instantaneous spewing of thoughts and feelings that social media inspires in us. The latter certainly serves a purpose, but on its own it can really make you lose your center. Returning to Ski End rehearsals has helped me feel more centered, which makes smaller actions like regularly contacting Congress members, much easier and clearer.

Although I'm skeptical of the phrase "now more than ever," it's exciting to feel the urgency of the work we're making, and it's making me impatient to share it with our community. But for now, we'll keep working on it because we're not done yet!

Raising money is hard. Partying is also hard, in the sense that it is something we do hard. You know, when we’ve had enough sleep the night before. Before we were Piehole, we were just the last people to leave the party you didn’t invite us to. In honor of this legacy, and to advocate for a fundraising model that suggests we exchange entertainment and memories for your generous donations, we are throwing our third ever Piehole fundraiser party! If you were lucky enough to have been hanging out with us on one of the best nights of our collective lives, you might have been at our last party: “Hole Up: A Piehole Social.” We cozied up into the church basement of our New England-y dreams, and watched our favorite New England bands magically transported into the bodies of our favorite local New York bands. We danced and danced and ruined some fine vintage dresses with whipped cream pies.

That was almost two years ago, and while it’s true that trying to have fun during an election year can seem emotionally risky, we’re gonna do it again. We’re gonna party. And we want you to come. Actually, let’s be honest - we need you to come. We won’t have fun without you. I mean, no pressure but...come hang out with us in our teen center/ski lodge/romantic novel!!!! Why is it a teen center/ski lodge/romantic novel? What do those three things have to do with each other? Hopefully we’ll raise enough moolah at the party to finish the show so we can all find out! In the mean time, we can tell you a couple of things it means:

​1. It means a bunch of adult-somethings will give in to their primal teen-something urges and present us with FRANKEN-TEEN COVER BANDS! Unholy monsters of angst, hormones, and teen idols: Lesley Gore in the style of The Runaways (RUNAWAY GORE!), Minor Threat in the style of The Violent Femmes (VIOLENT THREAT!), and Hanson in the style of Sam Cooke (HANSAM COOKE!), performed by inimitable Sam Cooke tributionist Ronald Peet. All the indecision and noise you thought you’d grow out of but never did!!

2. It means you will be guided through the evening by Ikechukwu Ufomadu (of Ike at Night) and Brendan Thomas Crowley, Byronic comedic icons, who might award you PRIZES PRIZES PRIZES for top-notch party behavior.

3. It means your favorite 7-train journey through sexual majesty, L’Amour Bleu, will be doing something they said would be “on theme” and I’m worried.

5. It means that we will dance like the weird kids in school right up until our curfew!

6. It means you will have the opportunity to bid on PRIZES PRIZES PRIZES in our famous raffle! Yes, some lucky bastard WILL get to attack us with pies again! And yes, we will have beautiful handmade jewelry, art, pottery, a wine tour voucher (yeah we're not such slobs afterall) and more!!

7. It means you can honor the greatest fundraising tradition of them all, YE OLDE BAKE SALE!

8. It means you can just lounge around after a tough day on the slopes and talk to your friends if you want. Relax, man!

All of this will go down at BEAM center, which is the kind of place we all wish we’d been able to go to as kids. Let’s do this, dudes. Let’s escape to the mountains and be free again!!! These are the details: